The pain of PR2 is now over, www.eazel.com now
holds the PR2 release, I can return to normal.

It got a bit gruesome in the end, especially the last
night where a load of
us were sitting rooting out the last bugs/testing till 6 in
the morning
where the release shipped. But now the pain is over.

I have managed some fun though, last week was halloween,
that was pretty funny.
My neighbors had a smash of a halloween party, pictures here.
The asian guy next to me is
Andrew, my primary comrade in drinking these days. Halloween
night itself
was just the Castro being filled with wierd people. They had
blocked of a
rather big part of Market street, and there was just a sea
of people dressed
up (and a few boring people like me, who weren't). This
wasn't the tv halloween
of annoying kids that I thought it would be, this was
slightly more festive.

This saturday, Steph had her birhtday party, which was
held in the
tiki style. So there was vast amounts of booze and drinks
with annoying stuff
sticking up and poking your nose (and you can choke on those
small plastic mermaids btw.).
But the party was fun, and the aftermath was severe, but the
place is now clean.

Other then that, it's a bit difficult
to recall what actually has happened
since then, it's mostly been work, interrupted by getting
home, sleeping some
hours and then hauling my arse back to work.

Now we'll have to hope that the PR2 release is good
enough to make it worth
the pain it was.

In case you didn't get it, PR2 was my main object of hacking
these past weeks.

Robey
and I have concluded
that doing dep check stuff through rpm is a pain and we can
do the stuff so muchmore swiftly and with a better user
experience if we skip it and do all dep
stuff ourselves. So thats the post pr2 plan.

As Max (of Sam and Max) put it "it's dark and greasy
and smelly under there". Thats whats under the hood of my
car. But my
left headlight and left front turnlights were dead, and
after twice driving with
only one headlight and no left front turnlights I decided to
leap
into action. So this morning I cruised by the Honda shop and
bought the nessecary parts. Now apparently, a headlight
isn't just a bulb you can replace, but a complete
lightfixture for which they charge you loads of money. The
turnlights are just bulbs though. So it was a total of 20$
(!!).

So after the parking lot emptied out here at Eazel, I
started experimenting with The Stuff Under The Hood.

Now my fingers are greasy but I have all my lights in
fine working condition.

If I get elected to the board (yeah right), I will recommend
sensitivity training for everyone who is subscribing to the
g-h list.
Or at least one long deep breath before pressing send (or
should
that be sendMailNow ?)

I think that about concludes my propaganda. Now start
figuring
out who else to vote on.

life

None what so ever, well, almost, went eating & drinking with
assorted eazel people last night. Arlo knows the good places
to wine&dine.

Steph is
now working at Eazel (congrats!), so I guess that makes the
apt in SF the official Eazel SF Office.

Much nautilus bootstrap installer work. It's a mixture of
fixing small libeazelinstall oddities, but mostly making the
bootstrap installer use the info given by the lib, and
acting just a bit sane (or at least manage to install
nautilus).

Blam - that was tough getting back. There was quite a lot to
do at
eazel, and as a result, I have had no interesting
experiences lately
that would warrent a diary entry.

I still missing some of my stuff from the plane trip
back. It has
apparently been in SF since the day after I arrived. But
somewhere in
between United Airlines, Lufthansa and the kindergarden
called US
Customs, the loot just hasn't gotten further. Impressive...

So I've also been persuaded to be a candidate for the gnome
foundation. While my candicacy statement should have
indicated that
I'm not in either of the two groups that I personally think
candidates
normally are in. While not being opposed to being in the
foundation, I
just know that I 1) cannot get as engaged about it as others
2) cannot
use the same amount of time (there's hacking to do).
Therefore, I
judge myself as not being a good choice for the foundation.
But the
candidacy is serious, it is not a joke.

hacking

As we finally began to use the installer on peoples weird
machines, we
of course found a load of weird rpm corner-cases; the most
nasty are
the ones where a rpm --rebuilddb is needed, but there are
also cases
where people have been force installing stuff, erasing
stuff, rpm's
with real bad dependencies and whatnot.

So it's been a long week of putting out one fire after
the other,
as these bugs are PR2 requirements, and often they block
testing of
the bootstrapinstaller.

But robey
has done
some nice stuff in the bootstrap installer, which we now
need to move
into the install view.

Also made a set of gnome-pilot 0.1.55pre tarballs, that I
need to
test and upload today.

Anyways I had a real good time those two weeks. Enough to
make me look
forward to moving back. I got around to do all the stuff I
wanted to do,
and saw almost all the people I needed to see (missed
three).

Basically I was spending the two weeks seeing old
friends, getting drunk
and engaging myself i general debauchery, sort of like what
I was doing
before I moved to SF.

The flight back was uneventfull, except that I got
delayed 6 hours, ended in
Chicago with half my luggage, thanks Frankfurt Main...

Oh, and the wankers in .dk voted no on the Euro,
next they'll be voting for the creepy rightwing parties,
*sigh*.

Robey had been hacking on my bugs while I was away, and
of
course he had found
a spiffy case (updating libtiff of all things), which
libeazelinstall couldn't
handle gracefully. "gracefully" means figuring out what to
download and not just say
"fuck off" to the user. And fixing the case proved to be
non-trivial,
since I've already bolted so-and-so many special cases onto
the code. So this weekend has been spent remodelling a lot
of the code.

Looks like I've got an INS/AIESEC issue. I've got this
funky pink
piece of paper (IAP-66,
and here),
that states that I'm "in good standing" with my workplace.
So when I want to leave the country (at max 28 days, let's
not forget that),
I have to mail this paper to AIESEC, get them to sign that
it's
ok for me to leave the country, and then them mail it back
to me.

So ideally, when I return to El Statos, I can show this
paper
plus my visa and they'll let me in.

The issue is, that I haven't gotten the paper back yet,
and I'm taking off
tuesday morning. As far as I can remember, my visa is
invalid without said
paper, which means that if I do not get it, I can be denied
reentry... blech.

This could prove interesting...

And my temporary drivers license expires while I'm gone,
and the friggin
DMV haven't gotten their finger out of their collective big
butt yet and mailed
me my real one.

Ack. Since the usable milestone is probably going to end
right after I get back,
I have to finish my hard tasks (libeazelinstall) before I
take off. Basically,
it's the tasks that require knowledge of all the library's
parts, and thus
would be timeconsuming for the others in my group to fix.

So therefore I have to close an estimated 32 hours of
tasks before monday. Today
I got around to the worst ones and have closed almost 20
hours (luckily some of them
were far less then the estimate), but it's bloody 4:30 and I
want to go home
and sleep.

So now I'm down to one ugly bug that looks like gnome-vfs
chokes on my rpm search urs...

We had an earthquake just last saturday.
Fits well, since Robey at
work commented that the weather was earthquake weather... I
was at the kilowatt with my
neighbors Andrew and Guatam(sp?). But
apparently it could hardly be fejt in SF.

Oh I also feel the need to tell about a funky native ritual.
Whenever it drizzles a bit, (we're not talking hard rain
here, we're talking det drypper), the
natives begin to believe they've angered the gods. So they
begin
a series of human sacrificing on the roads, where they drive
at normal speed, and they normal distance (which even in dry
weather is way to short). So oddly enough, going down the
101 means passing a few accidents, whereof one had closed
all lanes in the northbound direction.